ARTICLES ABOUT YOUNG WOMAN BY DATE - PAGE 2

Not having much opportunity to hear how the Young People talk (my Loyola students tend toward taciturnity), I was intrigued to hear a new usage this morning on the campus shuttle bus. "Did you see that crazy guy on the sidewalk? I was really sketched out by that," I overheard a young woman say. I surmise that to be sketched out is extended from the vogue for sketchy , which Merriam-Webster lists as meaning "questionable" or "iffy," as in the phrase "a sketchy character.

Amanda Knox and Casey Anthony. Comely, 20-something, white women accused of horrible crimes, convicted by a salacious press but freed by the courts. Yet Ms. Knox flew home from Italy to Seattle to welcoming ceremonies, tears of relief, and the warm embrace of family and friends, while Ms. Anthony left her Florida jail cell under cover of darkness and went into hiding out of fear for her life. She is estranged from her family and said to be without a friend in the world. Ms. Knox was called a "Luciferina" and a "she-devil" and accused of participating in the throat-slashing murder of her virginal British roommate in Perugia, where both were exchange students, as part of some kind of crazed sex game.

On the eve of her 21st birthday, a young woman leaving the local Howard County foster care system after nine placements/homes was welcomed to her first apartment by eight local residents and two truckloads of used but sturdy furniture. Her housewarming was courtesy of Fostering Futures: An initiative of Voices for Children, Howard County's court-appointed special advocates. Fostering Futures Howard County seeks to develop a community network using the internet and other means to support youth aging out of foster care.

To rebuild her life, Felicia "Snoop" Pearson had to destroy her reputation. The actress who portrayed a cold-blooded killer so memorably on three seasons of the HBO cable series "The Wire" pleaded guilty this month to a crime she says she didn't commit. In exchange for her conviction on a misdemeanor count of conspiracy to sell heroin, the 31-year-old Pearson received her freedom. And she swears that when her face appears in public in the future, it will be because of her acting accomplishments, not her legal troubles.

A 22-year-old woman was held against her will and brutally abused for as long as nine months before being dropped off, critically injured, at a Baltimore County hospital, police confirmed Thursday. Two people have been arrested in the case and charged with attempted murder, assault and false imprisonment. The victim, who has a year-old child, remains in critical condition at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, according to police. Police said that Germaine A. Smith-Bey, 29, and his girlfriend, Kimberly Stacy King, 37, kept the woman tied up in a bathroom in their apartment on Brookebury Drive in Reisterstown and released her bindings only when she would scream that she needed to relieve herself.

The young woman believed to have tossed her newborn baby from a second-story window is being evaluated for mental competence at a state institution, Baltimore County police said Tuesday. Rebecca Diane Himes, 21, who maintained that she had not known she was pregnant before delivering the child, will be taken into police custody as soon as she is released from the institution, said Cpl. Michael Hill, a spokesman for the department. She was charged Monday with attempted first-degree murder, child abuse and reckless endangerment in connection with the July 22 incident at her home on Virginia Avenue in Reisterstown.

A young woman who was shot in her Northwest Baltimore home Sunday evening died at Sinai Hospital, police said. "Detectives believe the shooting may have possibly been accidental," said Agent Donny Moses, a Baltimore police spokesman. Police received a call for a shooting around 7:30 p.m. and discovered that the woman was shot in the neck while inside her home at the 2600 block of Quantico Ave. Her name has not yet been released.

After serving 22 years of a life sentence for a rape and murder he says he didn't commit, James A. Thompson Jr. was granted a new trial Thursday based on new DNA evidence. He immediately entered a new plea and — per an agreement between sides — received a new sentence that amounted to time served. He's a free man. It was a joyous moment for his relatives, who sat in the back corner of the Baltimore courtroom, quietly watching. And it was yet another disappointment for the victim's family, who already endured a similar release of Thompson's only co-defendant in 2008.